On Mon, Nov 21, 2022 at 2:23 PM Werner LEMBERG <w...@gnu.org> wrote: > > > Sorry, luatex is like 10yrs old, what's the need for xetex again? > > Some issues that potentially speak against using luatex: > > * LuaTeX's OpenType support is still in flux and sometimes buggy. The > future is probably luatex-hb, using the 'HarfBuzz' library for > OpenType font handling. >
Yes, that seems to be their opinion as well. > * The main target of LuaTeX is not LaTeX but ConTeXt, which means that > some features (speak: extensions) are probably not as much tested. > As one data point, the stuff I build myself is substantially more complex than the luatex documentation (lots of maths), minus of course the truckloads of inlined minipdf's the docs have because of including the music (which I believe can be done more tightly in luatex, like one would use pigmentize, but we digress). Although they do target ConTeXt, I can't say that LaTeX runs poorly on luatex, actually it seems to me it runs just fine. > * AFAIK, `luatex` is *much* slower than `pdftex`. > I'd say that for a 80-100page document it's maybe somewhere between 50% and twice as slow. Still it's a several seconds build that becomes more several seconds. I'm not sure it crosses important workflow thresholds [1], it certainly didn't in my own use. [1] http://enderton.org/eric/pub/workflow.pdf > > Maybe I could justify pdftex (I really don't quite see it, but > > maybe) but xetex seems just arbitrary... Or do you mean for a > > transition period? > > We changed to XeTeX because pdfTeX produces invalid PDF outlines if > non-ASCII characters are involved. This is not a problem with pdfTeX > itself but due to lack of support in `texinfo.tex`. At that time of > the switch, LuaTeX support wasn't ready – there was a `luatex` bug > that stalled further work for two months or so (until someone > suggested a workaround, see MR !1740). > Ok but then are you saying pdfTeX is not usable today, and it's either XeTeX or LuaTeX today? > > What's the oldest system that this Lilypond would be used on? > > What's the youngest texlive that will run on that system? That's > > your tex distro of reference. > > TeXLive runs on virtually *all* systems, even old ones based on the > i386 chips. This means there is no useful answer, AFAICS. > Au contraire: it means you can ask anybody that builds our docs to upgrade their tex distro to a new one, and they'll have a working LuaTeX "no matter what system they use othrwise". Which seems to me it's a very useful answer (it removes one constraint I guess). -- Luca Fascione
